MAHDI: Internal bleeding

For a significant number of you, experience with hospital drama is acquired by sitting motionless in front of the television. You watch one of the numerous medically themed shows that has found itself a new lease on life in mainstream entertainment. Transfixed, your heart starts pounding against your will as you pray the team can extract a giant tree branch from the head of a writhing man; a man who later in the episode turns out to be the estranged brother of a serial killer, who shot down the surgeon’s third cousin. Medical jargon is flung about with hideous inaccuracy. The whole scene is farcical, but it pulls on your heartstrings nonetheless. A certain mystique surrounds the medical profession in society; when someone mutters “I’m a doctor,” a collective gasp of enthusiasm followed by helpings of praise larger than any food portion at the Cheesecake Factory descends on this admirable soul. Short of choirs singing in the background, you stare in wonder at these superheroes who don surgical masks and lab coats in lieu of swishing capes and deceiving masks.

My preconceived notions of medicine were at the forefront of my mind when I came across the story of Karla Flores. My appreciation for medical professionals everywhere skyrocketed to new heights. Karla Flores was rushed to the hospital in Mexico when an object collided into her face, hurtling out of nowhere, preceded only by a loud bang. Selling seafood, she immediately collapsed. When she regained consciousness, she was in the Culiacan General Hospital.  Complaining of copious bleeding, the doctors deemed an x-ray to be the best course of action. One would expect some kind of rock, bottle or piece of glass had been wedged in her face, eliciting unimaginable throbs of pain. What these doctors discovered was distressing: Karla Flores had a live grenade wedged in her face. If any pressure was placed on the weapon, the whole hospital could be in grave danger. Fighting against disease was no longer the only battle patients’ faced for those few hours. Surgeons remained reluctant to operate on her due to the gravity of circumstance. Karla’s breath began to tighten; four brave volunteers from various departments were faced with overwhelming adversity.  Accompanied by two military explosive experts, the surgeon was only able to administer local anesthesia. Unprotected in any way, the grenade was extracted as they performed the entire operation on a field, the small group forced to utilize nature’s operating room to eradicate a man-made danger.

Karla’s face will have to undergo years of surgery before it can be considered normal again. She has lost numerous teeth, but her life was saved. Here is not drama that originates in television manuscripts, but in a show of unity and strength in light of unprecedented fear. However, hospitals around the world do not busy themselves with solely physical issues. What of the tangled web of mental illness? Karla’s grenade was carefully extracted from her head, but for Kim Noble, her interior battle against explosions of various personalities cannot be helped.

Kim is diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Her condition is so severe that she can’t recollect the birth of her own daughter. She uncovers clothes she has no memory of purchasing, food she has no memory of eating, and the remnants of chores she has no recollection of completing. At its height, she can recount possessing about 20 different personalities, ranging from a self-conscious teenage girl, to a little boy who only writes in Latin. Kim can’t recall the transitions between characters that all reside in her head, but she accepts that she has lost the essence of her own personality. For Kim’s entire life, she has battled against these figments of her imagination that are borne from intense trauma she has experienced growing up. Desperately clawing at shreds of her sanity hidden amidst the rubble of her psyche, all her energy goes toward making sure she has the mental aptitude to take care of her daughter.

In medicine, hordes of doctors, nurses and surgeons are instructed on how to treat thousands of diseases and conditions. They study delicate sinews of every muscle in our human body. Now, these individuals are faced with saving us from our own selves. These people display commendable acts of kindness, which preserve a deeper faith in human compassion. In a world where we are persistently faced with examples of selfishness, mistrust and ruthlessness, these personal accounts remind us that somewhere out there are people who are willing to make sacrifices for strangers. Perhaps thinking of these two events in conjunction, we can realize that while we may be able to extract physical dangers, like a live grenade, we have to remain vigilant against theoretical ones. Instead of treating patients whose minds have disintegrated with stigma, we should collectively attempt to further our understanding and tolerance for their plight. Just as Superman regresses back to his alter-ego Clark Kent, men and women hang up their professional attire, regressing back to their other selves as they stride out into the world, content to remain anonymous like their comic book counterparts.

Sofiya Mahdi is a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences and a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at sofiya21@bu.edu.